Get your mind out of the gutter. You'll never need to pick a pipe of pickled pepper again

Many of will have heard the tale of a lady who sells seashells on the sea shore. Now it's time for the unnamed beach trader to get a new job because MIT boffins have invented the world's toughest tongue teaser.

Axcient and Zetta have seized the moment and are offering migration services to Backup Exec Cloud users facing being left out in the unprotected cold by Symantec's withdrawal from the Backup Exec Cloud offering.

People who live in World Cup 2014 host country Brazil and supporters of bookie's favourite Germany are most active in searching for World Cup tickets, according stats from event ticketing website Ticketbis.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has delivered some insightful images of a monster storm raging at Saturn's north pole - a six sided-beast 'wider than two Earths' and within which winds reach an umbrella-shredding 350km/h.

Windows 8 is going down like a bucket of cold sick - but you're going to have to get used to it. It's not going away. If Microsoft has a future, this is it. Worse still, if you're a pro, you're going to have to support the thing.

The phone call from Western Digital's people promised me “a completely new category of hard drive”. Naturally I was sceptical. After all, what could possibly be new in the world of rotating magnetic media – and don’t we all just want fast SSDs anyway?

An attempt by security researchers to take down command and control nodes associated with the infamous CryptoLocker malware appears to have been unsuccessful in its ultimate aim of putting the Bitcoin-hungry crooks behind the scam out of business.

Feeling old? Clapped out? Weary of the cut and thrust of everyday work? Looking for a role that pays shitloads of dosh while demanding no relevant experience or demonstrable skill, but chairmanship of the Co-Op bank remains tantalisingly out of your league due to your clean living and good character?

The appeal of replacing your desktop is not exactly hard to appreciate. For me, a big screen, decent sized keyboard and a measure of portability, all add up to deliver one thing: convenience. So here I am with Dell’s latest Inspiron 15 7000 series laptop and, curiously enough, it is on my lap, all 2.6kg of it.

Struggling mobe-makers Blackberry knocked back the chance to have pint-sized pop prince Justin Bieber as a brand ambassador at the peak of both RIM and Bieber's careers, claims a senior Blackberry staffer.

Some spook agencies like to hide their more ominous workings from the innocent public, protecting Joe Bloggs from thinking too much about the power and influence that can come with snooping on the world. But the US National Reconnaissance Office take a different approach.

Microsoft is advancing non-Microsoft service providers as a core part of its Cloud OS strategy. In part one of this series I looked at what Cloud OS was and why you might care about using it on your own premises.

IT PASS more likely to be £300m, say sceptical sources - and as for year's end? Whatever

A group of professional buyers for government have given hardware and software suppliers the heads-up on an overarching public sector procurement vehicle - and it estimates that to be worth up to £6bn.

Google is promoting a White House petition to reform the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that would force government agencies to get a warrant before rifling through emails and other electronic communications.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is recruiting members of the hacking community to join its latest Grand Challenge competition: a big-money contest to build software capable of finding and fixing security holes in new code.

And that's after 'substantial discounts' from its BFF outside legal counsel

In a court document filed on Thursday, Apple revealed that it has run up over $60m in billings by outside legal counsel in its patent-infringement battle against Samsung, with a goodly chunk of that owed to its lead legal team from the law firm of Morrison & Foerster.

EU antitrust regulators have raided the European offices of Philips, Samsung, retail group Media-Saturn, and several other consumer electronics companies, but so far they're not saying what they were looking for.

'We noticed you were holding an iPhone at a friend's wedding, need any accessories?'

Next time you post an image of your new El Reg prosthetic beak on the internet, be aware that marketers will soon have a tool to let them spot it, isolate it, and figure out what it's pictured alongside.

Chinese banks may not be too keen on Bitcoin at the moment (which has done something to damp down the current price) but a new research report from Bank of America rates it as a major player in future internet transactions.

Procedures not yet set up to dole out television space for wireless use

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is planning to delay the hotly anticipated auction of the former broadcast television spectrum space due to concerns that it is not yet ready to properly handle the reallocation process.